Teachers Share their Experiences While Living Abroad!

Traveling across the world can be super stressful! Watch this video blog to get a better perspective on all the money questions you may have! You will soon learn that Korean banking and foreign transfers, are a piece of cake, while living and teaching in Korea!

After posting last week about my favorite experiences and activities in Korea during my three years of teaching there, part two of my final reflections will take a more pragmatic tone: advice and information. Specifically, I'm going to focus on moving to Korea and concerns about money. There are definitely a lot of things I wish I'd known before and during my time abroad, so if you have questions, read on and let my experience be a learning opportunity for all.

It's no big secret that teaching English in Korea is a great way to save a sizable chunk of money. I'm sure you've seen bloggers boasting about putting $1,000 USD per month into savings while working in Korea. I'm also sure this was met with a degree of skepticism and follow-up Googling. Well, this is very, very possible as a teacher in Korea. With a reasonable overall cost of living, getting by from day to day here can easily be done on the cheap, so long as you're committed to a degree of frugality and creating good habits. In my three years in Korea, I feel like I've managed my money well, so here are some money budgeting tips and tricks that I've picked up along the way.

So I’m sure everyone has his or her own reasons for teaching English in South Korea. Many people come just for the new experiences and the chance to immerse themselves in a foreign culture, but there is a significant portion of the Chungdahm community using their earnings to pay off student debts. With that financial mountain looming over many of us, we are all looking for ways to save money. Personally, I am not one to spend all my nights staring at my computer screen, depriving myself of fun just for the sake of frugality. But I still do make an attempt (some months I am more successful than others) to save a decent chunk of my paycheck, and here are my strategies for doing so. Don’t worry, they don’t require burning whale oil, living off a ramen and water diet, or using smoke signals to communicate with your friends.

I've been to my share of malls throughout my lifetime in the states, so why stop because I'm teaching in South Korea? I'm a true believer of retail therapy and if there's anyone out there like me, I hope this post will somehow have an impact on you.

This post is not to scare anyone away from coming to teach English in South Korea. It's more like a reminder/advice about things to take care of before making the trip across the world. I wish I knew about this before I came out so things could have worked out smoothly.

Although I still have an endless number of places I want to go while teaching English in Korea, I decided that I needed a change of scenery for the weekend. Since Japan and Korea are so close to each other, my fellow English teachers and I were able to find round trip tickets for about $300 US. I'd say that's a sweet deal considering that you're going to a different country and I remember paying more than that for my trip to NY from Georgia!